Abstract
All extant eukaryotes descend from the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), which is thought to have featured complex cellular organization. To gain insight into LECA biology and eukaryogenesis—the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which remains poorly understood—we reconstructed the LECA virus repertoire. We compiled an inventory of eukaryotic hosts of all major virus taxa and reconstructed the LECA virome by inferring the origins of these groups of viruses. The origin of the LECA virome can be traced back to a small set of bacterial—not archaeal—viruses. This provenance of the LECA virome is probably due to the bacterial origin of eukaryotic membranes, which is most compatible with two endosymbiosis events in a syntrophic model of eukaryogenesis. In the first endosymbiosis, a bacterial host engulfed an Asgard archaeon, preventing archaeal viruses from entry owing to a lack of archaeal virus receptors on the external membranes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank P. López-García for invaluable, inspiring discussions and critical reading of the manuscript and S. Roux for helpful advice. E.V.K. is supported by funds from the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health (National Library of Medicine). V.V.D. was partially supported by a National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine/National Center for Biotechnology Information Visiting Scientist Fellowship. M.K. was supported by l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant ANR-21-CE11-0001-01.
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Supplementary Table 1
The representation of virus phyla in major eukaryotic lineages.
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Krupovic, M., Dolja, V.V. & Koonin, E.V. The virome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor and eukaryogenesis. Nat Microbiol 8, 1008–1017 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01378-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01378-y
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